On Drugs and Alcohol

On Drugs and Alcohol Sam Fryman

On Drugs and Alcohol

2

Also by the same author A Mens Liberation Guide to Women 4th edition A Womens Liberation Guide to Men 2nd edition How to Meditate Kundalini - Preventing the Apocalypse A Mens and Womens Liberation Update The Myth of the Teenage Rebellion What Is Intelligence? Kundalini - A Personal Experience Feminal Farm - a short satirical novel The Innocent Persons Guide to Law Understanding Female Sexuality and Porn Freedom of Speech & Maitreya An Innocent Persons Guide to the Da Vinci Code How the Feminists Stole Psychology Hearing Voices and Psychic Phenomena The Psychology of Soaps Is Competition Necessary?

On Drugs and Alcohol

3

On Drugs and Alcohol A recent UK newspaper article reported the case of a doctor’s son who had developed mental illness in the form of “schizophrenia”, and lamented how in the opinion of this doctor and father of the boy, his illness had been caused by cannabis use. In the online version of the newspaper many readers commented on the article with an alarming diversity of views. Why we are saying the diversity of views was alarming is because clearly on this topic of the effects of drugs like cannabis there is a massive amount of disagreement. Some commenters suggested that this father, though even a doctor, had merely made the assumption that there was a direct cause and effect link between the cannabis use and the so called ‘schizophrenia’ without any real evidence to prove it. Others agreed wholeheartedly and reported very similar cases to his son’s, also ascribing the cause to cannabis use, and ending with their friend or relative in a withdrawn, confused state, due to mid or long term cannabis use. Others were qualified psychologists or psychiatrists who said there was adequate proof of this cause and effect link between cannabis use and mental illness, which only those in denial could ignore, while other medical professionals said that it was only proven that there was an associative link between the two, i.e. that mental illness and cannabis use were often found in the same persons, though that did not necessarily mean that the cannabis use was the cause of the mental illness. Others again insisted that there was indeed a link between the two, but only in those who had a genetic predisposition towards schizophrenia to begin with, which might be as little as one percent of society. And finally, there were those who claimed that they and their friends had been using cannabis for years or decades and it hadn’t done them one iota of harm and therefore cannabis was in no way responsible for the fate of these people who were merely just not mentally balanced to begin with, and would have developed this mental illness with or without cannabis.

On Drugs and Alcohol

4

There is also a large army of people who now argue even a step beyond the latter group, that the real demon in our society is not cannabis, which they regard as a relatively harmless drug, but alcohol, ‘the demon drink’, which as they see it is responsible for so much violence, true addiction in the form of alcoholism, death by drink driving and so on, whereas cannabis is generally not. There is thus a growing call and campaign by many to legalise cannabis, and ban or discourage alcohol, whilst the general position of Western governments, based partly on this supposed growing medical evidence of the potential damaging effect of particularly long term cannabis use, is against legalisation, whilst still supportive of social drinking. So there is clearly a maze of thought going on around these issues – should cannabis be legalised? Should all alcohol use be frowned upon and eventually removed totally from our society, just as appears to be happening with tobacco use, few people anywhere now being convincingly able to deny that tobacco does damage every user’s health in one way or another? And in any case, is this an area where government should interfere, or should people rather have the right to do whatever they wish with their own bodies, as the pro-drug and cannabis legalisers advocate? So we see there is really a war going on regarding these issues, between those who defend their particular favourite ‘drug of choice’ to the hilt, and either want it legalised, or in the case of alcohol or tobacco, their right to use it defended to the nth degree, and those who want this same – as they see it – destructive and dangerous drug, stamped out of our society and world, and as we are well aware, the first casualty of any war is the truth. For as 80s rock band Was Not Was said about the latter issue in their socially and politically aware hit song Shake Your Head: And you can’t put your finger on the truth. And indeed, this is the problem.

On Drugs and Alcohol

5

We do not have any clear scientific medical understanding of what drugs of one kind or another are doing to the brain, because we simply don’t know enough about the workings of the brain, and likely for the foreseeable future, never will, it being such an incredibly complex organ, which makes our most complex modern computer seem as simple as an abacus by comparison. But this is only part of our vast ignorance on this issue, because the other vast area of ignorance is our understanding of the mind and consciousness. That is, we have mentioned there are those numerous persons who claim x years or decades of cannabis use has done them no harm. On what basis do they make such a statement? How do they know that if they develop cancer one day or become impotent or start showing signs of memory failing and the premature onset of senility and dementia, that the two matters are not related? Of course they don’t and won’t, because the medical understanding simply does not exist. We are not saying here that cannabis or any other specific drug does cause such conditions, we are just saying that this claim that their drugs ‘do no harm’ is not a safe one, but the baseless – from the scientific, rational and logical point of view – assertion of someone who staunchly defends their drug of choice out of their own need and desire. The point is, we do not want to hear anything negative about the legality or medically damaging nature of our favourite drug, whether it is alcohol, tobacco, cannabis or anything else. We need that drug, and just as in war, we will tell our people as many lies as necessary about ‘the enemy’ to persuade them that it is the right thing to do to drop bombs upon and destroy them, likewise ‘the enemy’ who seeks to interfere with our drug use must be ‘taken out’ and their arguments therefore invalidated, which if accepted might otherwise lead to our drug of choice being taken away from us. There are those who would argue the same regarding pornography, which we have discussed in our earlier work, Understanding Female Sexuality and Porn.

On Drugs and Alcohol

6

We have a society which allows some rich, powerful, selfish or fortunate people such as rock stars to have sex with hundreds or thousands of women while the average man is lucky if he gets even one attractive woman in his bed, so why should this average man be denied even the experience of looking at the many images of naked women that photography and pornography has created, whom he will likely never meet, they might argue? So on the face of it, this is a very strong argument, is it not? Modern science and Darwinist thinking tells us we are soulless impermanent creatures, just like any other animal, like a dog or an ant, and born only to die, which means to pass to an eternal state of physical non-existence and mental oblivion. How can we possibly deny such an unfortunate creature pleasure, in a life that is so short and so often filled with pain, misery and suffering? Nature has programmed our biological apparatus such that we experience pleasure most intensely when we mate. Though we cannot allow people to mate uncontrollably – i.e. to rape – surely at least we can allow them to imagine being in that experience through the use of images and moving pictures? Is that not a humane thing to do? These arguments are very persuasive, are they not? And they are the basis of what we might call ‘the liberal’ or ‘libertine’ view of life. There are all these ‘holier than thou’ persons around, often of a religious persuasion or belief system, who say ‘cast out thy sinful lusts’ and so on, ‘for fear that the Lord shall see thy wickedness and strike thee down, etc.’ Recently a female British journalist attacked the Muslim world, citing the ‘mad mullahs’, one of whom allegedly strangled a girl to death for ‘immoral behaviour’, and of course, whether this story is true or not, it adds further fuel to the fires of anger and hate which then justify in these peoples’ minds the military expeditions against and dropping of bombs upon Muslim countries, in the name of woman and child abuse.

On Drugs and Alcohol

7

So when we hear all these arguments flying around on the pros and cons of drug use, “sexual liberation” or anything else, we have to know what the hidden social and political forces and motivations are in each of these arenas of desire. In the case of sex for example, the ‘libertines’, the ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ people, have as we have said, just as Jimi Hendrix sang, got the kind of slogan and script: It’s me who is going to have to die when it’s my time to die So let me live MY life the way I want to.

But surely we cannot have any freedom to choose in life if we do not actually know the consequences of doing the things we do? For example, there was little awareness of what tobacco use could do to one’s health before the 1960s, so whole generations of people watched the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall lighting up, and thought it was a trendy and fashionable thing to do, and therefore imitated and emulated it. So let us consider – American colonists brought tobacco use back to Europe in the sixteenth century, and it has taken us over four hundred years to figure out that it was a bad idea. So major cannabis and hallucinogenic drug use has been around in the West for around a mere forty years, and we consider ourselves fit, do we, to judge it, even though it took four hundred years in the case of tobacco? We might argue – ah, but more medical and scientific knowledge exists now, so now we are in a position to figure this out much sooner. But as we have said – in terms of the effect on brain and nervous system, that knowledge is still severely limited, with all the ‘experts’ and members of the public being arrayed in arguing and opposing factions upon what is the real truth. That is, as things stand, the only real truth is that we don’t know the truth, we have only confusion upon these issues. Some people on either side of course will insist that they do know the truth, based on their own experiences or ‘evidence’ they claim to have.

On Drugs and Alcohol

8

So what are we as individuals and a society to do about this confused mess? We cannot certainly prove that cannabis or any particular hallucinogenic drug use creates mental illness. For example, a recently BBC documentary described the life of ex-Pink Floyd founder member Syd Barrett, who appeared to have become mentally unhinged and incoherent through long term hard drug use, and this was in fact the viewpoint of the Pink Floyd band members who witnessed his transformation from an idiosyncratic but happy-go-lucky individual to a dead-eyed near zombie, staring vacantly into space, with only intermittent periods of ‘lucidity’ and ‘normality.’ But again, because we cannot see the cogs and wheels inside the human brain, which give us a clear cause and effect picture of what is going on, we cannot definitely say cause and effect. We cannot say that Syd Barrett would not have ended up in such a state anyway, as he was clearly a very sensitive and creative individual in any case, and it is well known historically that such people can have various nervous and mental troubles, such as for example Van Gogh, whom as far as we are aware had no drug use in his life other than alcohol. So though we may have an opinion, which we shall explore later, we accept that our opinion on this issue of hallucinogenic type drugs – which we would definitely include cannabis in, in all but its mildest forms – is not going to be accepted by many, and thus this will not be the route to solve the crisis and conflict in opinions and beliefs on these matters. Therefore, rather we are going to look at the bigger picture. That is to say, we are so busy arguing about what drugs do or don’t cause, medically and mentally speaking, we haven’t asked the question – just why are people compulsively using drugs in the first place? And that is the very first thing that we wish the reader to deeply focus upon. That is – society is debating and arguing about what effect drugs do or do not have, but is almost completely overlooking the really major and critical issue of why are drugs there anyway?

On Drugs and Alcohol

9

And of course, we could equally apply that thinking to pornography. That is – why is it, that when we turn our TV and PC on, or visit our local news stall, we are assaulted (unrequested) with images of undressed women and naked flesh? There aren’t actually any naked women on Google or Microsoft’s homepage as yet of course, but the way things are going, one wonders how long is it going to be. But it doesn’t take the clicking of too many buttons before whether we asked for it or not, some kind of scantily clad image of female sexuality will appear, daring us to click upon it and ask for more. So we are asking – where did pornography come from? In ancient Rome, at Pompeii and so on, archaeologists have found pornographic drawings and paintings on the walls of the homes of the wealthy, and even pornographic statues depicting various sex acts and so on. Such discoveries are of course comforting to the modern ‘libertines’ who want to therefore assure us that pornography is ‘normal’ because it has always been around. But then you see, they would continue to tell us, those ‘religious nuts’ came along, and said ‘thou shalt not do x, y and z’ – you know – have carnal relations with dogs, pigs, other men and other mens’ wives, and so on – which was really therefore an outrageous assault on ‘freedom’ from their point of view. They said, just as do the modern users of drugs, sex is wonderful, sex doesn’t do anybody any harm. If religious people don’t want to have sex, that’s their problem, but it’s not their business to tell the rest of us what to do or not do to. But once again, we see, they are not asking this question – where did pornography come from in the first place? Which question surely needed answering just as much then as it does now.

On Drugs and Alcohol

10

So let us have a guess, in fact, rather draw using our own brain and imagination a clear line of cause and effect which must surely have been approximately how this situation of available pornography arose. Society has been ruled throughout most of recorded history by a rich and powerful few, an elite, an upper class of lords and princes and aristocrats. Because such people, like the Roman elite of citizens and emperors, did not have to much work for a living, they had a lot of time on their hands. Idle people of any class out of boredom are drawn to pleasure. Naturally, the greatest pleasures for the vast majority of people – who are not Beethovens or Einsteins who ‘get their kicks about the waistline’ (quote from One Night in Bangkok, Murry Head) – are drugs, gambling and sex. Drugs have always been known to lead to problems of addiction, gambling can take away one’s money and therefore possibility of enjoying a free and privileged selfish life, so sex alone has seemed like the safest way to get pleasure, and thus ‘the Roman orgy’ became the regular pastime of the Roman elite. But where there are rich and elite people, there will be those who aspire to join them, there will always be those who seek to peddle their wares to acquire the possessions and wealth of the rich, and will seek to use whatever means they can to part them from it, as in the famous story The Emperor’s New Clothes. So such salesmen (and women) – always on the look out for opportunities – may have seen the potential of selling images of unclothed beauty and sexual acts as a means to part company of these rich and elite from at least some of their riches. Thus they whispered in the ears of the rich – imagine my friend, my Master, that you were to have a party, and you were to invite the women whom you desired to such a party, be they even the wives of your friends, whom you have long desired, but never been able to obtain and feast your eyes upon the nakedness of.

On Drugs and Alcohol

11

Imagine further, that upon your walls, were pictures of the most beautiful naked Venuses and Adonises engaged in the most erotic of acts – whatever your taste may be – and these ladies as your guests and their spouses would be forced to view these images as they gratefully accepted your hospitality, afraid to offend or disrespect you. And imagine as the wine flowed and was consumed that inevitably their wills would be softened, and they would start to contemplate upon such images. In such a situation might not a man become so excited that he might desire your wife – indeed my fine artists could even depict her naked form to entice him – and might in his passion offer you his own in return? And thus, the thought in such a rich and bored person’s life that he could entice and persuade other men to lend him their beautiful wives and have his way with them, would intoxicate him to such a level, he might well pay the roguish devil in his ear whatever he asked to decorate some few or many of his walls in such a fashion. To another – he might even say to a lonely, old, maybe even ugly man, to whom women no longer came – that he could forever possess women by having their beautiful naked figures upon his walls, performing whatever exciting and titillating acts he pleased, perhaps even in a secret chamber of his house to which only he would have the key. So whilst we don’t mean to further start arousing anyone’s desire by suggestion, we can see how this form of pornography as in Roman painting, statues and so on could have arisen. Pornography started with the bored rich and elite, and then photography invented in the 19th century made it possible for the same cunning salesmen and women (remembering that women now control some major pornography and sex empires) to sell it to the masses. It is not there because we demanded it, just as are not all the drugs like tobacco, cannabis, and all the rest. It is there because an opportunist saw they could get rich by selling it to us and addicting us to it. So the libertine does not seem to dwell on this.

On Drugs and Alcohol

12

He just sees this is an issue of freedom. But the drug dealer – who is not necessarily the international fabulously rich drug trafficker or baron – he may merely be the next ‘sales exec’ up in the chain, however lowly, says: Who do these squares and governments think they are, telling you and I what we can put in our bodies? They ain’t go no right. Because he or she cannot possibly admit there is anything wrong in their trade, or with the drug they sell you, because that is how they make their living. Often, they are addicts too, and they need you to buy the drugs or the porn to fund their own even more expensive addiction. So these views of – “screw you, trying to tell me what to do with my own body, cannabis is great, cannabis does no harm, it’s that frigging booze that causes all the real trouble…etc.” – these users may imagine are their own ideas, but really, all they may be is sales propaganda that has come down from on high, the “on high” being that all those who wish to sell us anything – whether it be sex, drugs or rock n roll – have got nothing to say about it except this is great, this is fantastic, this is better than sliced bread man, and all those ‘mothers’ who say different are all enemies of freedom, enemies of your desire to be who you want do be, and do what you want to do. THEY are your enemies. WE are your friends. That is, leaving aside entirely the argument of whether drugs are ‘safe’ or ‘good for us’ or ‘harmless’ or not, we are just pointing out, that just like pornography, they are not there in our society, for our benefit, to make us happy; they are there to make a considerable many people who don’t have honest jobs – you know, a butcher, baker or candlestick-maker – a very good living, and to make a considerable few people fabulously rich. Just look at for example Hugh Hefner, who founded the Playboy empire, and has reportedly been to bed with around 20,000 girls. Is he not a Roman of the highest calibre?

On Drugs and Alcohol

13

We are not saying to the reader – here is a bad, really evil and wicked guy, who needs locking up or whatever. We are not judging others as individuals in such a way, for as Christ said – who is without sin that he should cast the first stone? We are just pointing out cause and effect. We are just saying, he is an addict, and he is saying like any other super-salesman – “my product – sex and porn – is wonderful, and I am providing you a service so you can have this wonderful thing too. Am I not a good and kind guy? OK. I don’t pretend I am not getting rich. But are your lives also not richer for the carnal knowledge (in pictures at least) of Miss February, Miss June and Miss July?” And that’s the sticky, tricky question we have to answer. Are our lives richer for that? Or are we just like addicts who once used to inject the drug for pleasure, but now are only still ‘shooting up’ to take away the pain? And maybe that’s all guys like Hugh Hefner are doing also. He needs his 20,000 women to take away the pain. Which brings us to the other half of the story. Which is to say – we are aware that porn and drugs are in our society because those who want to get wealthy and likely are also addicted to those things themselves have put them there. But then we have to ask, why did they find it so easy to infiltrate and overwhelm our society with these ultimately addictive materials? And the answer seems to be that we have a society in pain. A man or woman is in pain and a sales person says – Here. Take this pill. It will take away your pain. And the person in pain asks hopefully with a contorted frown: Will it? Will it really take away my pain?

On Drugs and Alcohol

14

And the sales person says: Yes, in just a minute, just a few seconds even, just a very short time, you will feel wonderful. You will have no more pain. Now, who is it that is in pain, who could resist an offer like that? So it is child’s play, it is easy, to addict the members of our society to a thousand or even million things. Because what we have is a society in pain. The son of the doctor with whom we opened our discussion, who had gone into a state of alleged ‘schizophrenia’ and not really able to function in society any more, was as usual on the face of it, superficially one of those you know – ‘had everything to live for’, ‘top of the class achiever’ and so on, until this ‘unaccountable tragedy’ occurred. And there lies our problem, in this word unaccountable. Because we do not understand the nature of our society, we do not appreciate its cruelty, we do not understand that the way we are running things and educating and raising children is leading to a society of youths and adults who spent unduly large proportions of their time in pain. Because the pain is primarily psychological, not physical, we do not have any instruments to measure their suffering. Is it not fascinating? We can measure planets, and even galaxies, we can measure time and space to infinitesimal fractions of a second or a millimetre or an inch, but we don’t have any way whatsoever to measure human suffering so it seems. Yet there is a way. It is called sensitivity. Most of us imagine we are ‘sensitive.’ But sadly all this tends to mean is that we are sensitive to our own suffering, our own pain – that is, as opposed to real sensitivity which means being sensitive to somebody else’s suffering and pain.

On Drugs and Alcohol

15

And then guess what is it that makes us insensitive? It is the very same things we use to take away our own pain – powerful emotions like anger, jealousy, pride, and overindulging in exciting pleasures and passions of any kind, including excess sex and drug use. And in fact, many of us are thereby not sensitive even to our own pain. Because by strategic fixes of drink, drugs and sex we can keep the pain at bay, or some of us can even use an overzealous and dictatorial religious view to do the same. Let us consider an old 1960s song by Eric Clapton’s former group Cream called World of Pain: There is a world of pain In the falling rain Around me Is there a reason for today? Do you remember? I can hear all the cries of the city, No time for pity for a growing tree There is a world of pain In the falling rain Around me

We can see this pain, not only in the song lyrics but in the tortured, wailing guitar solos of artists like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. These solos and performances are odes and soliloquies in sound to the tortured spirit, to the human soul in pain. The sex act itself is resorted to not necessarily out of desire, but out of the desire to salve the tortured spirit, to ease the pain. And then as we have said, we are insensitive to not only our own pain, but to everybody else’s also. So society and science has to acknowledge the fact that we are not merely a competitive animal, happy to struggle in a Darwinistic survival contest to win territory and mates, we are a creature that seeks order, harmony and meaning in life. At minimum, we can perhaps all agree upon the seemingly undeniable fact that we seek to avoid suffering.

On Drugs and Alcohol

16

And how are we to end this suffering? For example, let us take the starving millions. Do we imagine that were we to feel the aching hunger in the bellies of these countless unfortunate people, doomed soon to die, hardly having been long born, we would not immediately take action to fill their hunger and quench their thirst? But we do not. We can only feel our own hunger, our own suffering – we do not feel theirs. And why do we not feel it? Because as we must repeat once again, we are insensitive. For example again, we meet the reckless or clumsy driver out on the road, and they cut across our path dangerously, maybe nearly causing an accident, and we say: That goddam stupid idiotic maniac nearly put me in the hospital. If I could only get my hands on him (or her) I would put him (or her) in the morgue. We don’t think to ourselves – maybe that person has just been jilted by their lover or spouse, maybe that person’s best friend has just died, maybe that person is ill and the lack of control of the vehicle is a result of what they cannot control. Maybe that person has been so battered by the stresses of life they are wildly out of control and can’t take any more. Yes, of course, they could just be a selfish pig or sow who is in the habit of daily trampling over the rights of everyone else. But even that is a form of addiction they don’t necessarily understand and can’t control. Any indulgence in powerful emotions can make us insensitive, such as indulging in nationalistic pride or religious fervour, which can then put us into such an insensitive callous state, we can murder our ‘enemy’, we can drop bombs on his people, because we cannot see their existence as human beings like ourselves, we cannot feel their suffering or feel their pain.

On Drugs and Alcohol

17

The sensitive people everywhere call for an end to war, whereas the insensitive brutish ones carry on killing, whether it be in the name of God, King, Queen or country or anything else. That is, imagine that inside each one of us was planted a device, that meant that we could feel the pain of others. Imagine that therefore if we were to slap or strike another, the pain that they felt, the burning on their cheek, the ache in their jaw, we felt also as if it had been us that had been struck. Imagine that the pain caused by the harsh words of insult and hate we directed at another, the emotions of humiliation, we felt too, rather than only our victim. Imagine that the anguish and agony experienced by those whom we have stabbed or shot or dropped fire or bombs upon we felt too, because of this amazing unique device that has been planted in each one of us. Would not then all violence, all hate and all war quickly come to an end? And as we have said, such a device does exist. As we have said, it is called sensitivity – the ability to feel what others feel, to imaginatively or intuitively enter their minds and hearts and know what is there – what they are going through – as if it was our own mind and heart we were experiencing the awareness of. And therefore, the preservation and cultivation of this sensitivity in all our citizens is the very most important thing in our entire life and world. This is perhaps the single overriding powerful reason why more than mild use of drugs and alcohol and moderate indulgence in sex is not just some kind of religious or biblical injunction and prohibition, it is essential if we are to have a peaceful world. Because if we don’t have this sensitivity in bucket loads, we can hurt other people, we can make war upon them, we can race or gender hate them, we can abuse them, we can violate, injure, rape and murder them. In a hostage situation, hostages are advised to talk to their captors, to try to get them to see them as fellow human beings, to awaken their sensitivity.

On Drugs and Alcohol

18

But then the question is, what do we do when we are oppressed by such insensitive brutes, such monsters, who may even be in power of a whole country and have a powerful army in the palm of their hands? As many of us as possible have to wake up, have to grow more sensitive, and keep pointing the finger and saying ‘look, can you not see our leader is a monster, that he brings disaster on our own people by his needless attacking of those in other lands, by his creating of hate of our own people? Can you not see he is intoxicated with power, so that he feels nothing, so that he can even smile while his soldiers and generals commit genocide, indiscriminate killing and rape?” And when enough of us humans wake up to our sensitivity, our humanity we will not let these people lead us any more. We will give them a strait jacket and a rubber room whose padded walls they can war against, until their inner madness subsides, until they calm down and become real human beings once again. But let us stay close, and not get intoxicated (and therefore insensitive) with the grandeur of international events, let us return to the boy, the doctor’s son. If we look closer, we find this boy is ‘a high achiever’, he has been to public school. Public school in England means usually he or she (e.g. Princess Diana) is sent away from the loving ‘bosom’ of the family home at an early age, and made to survive amongst strangers – who are now mostly programmed to be hostile and competitive and bullying by society – from this early age. So after taking this young boy away from his parents, from his father and mother, those same parents demand that he be a success – they don’t have to say so directly, but they just talk about what great things he is going to achieve just like his dad and thereby exert a pressure upon him, which he may or may not be adequate to meet. He knows what great pride they take in his ‘success’, and how they will boast to all their friends and colleagues about all his achievements.

On Drugs and Alcohol

19

But inside himself he is a fragile emotional sensitive creature. He doesn’t like all the pressure and the bullying. He doesn’t like being depersonalized and made a puppet of his parents’ ideals and desires. But he still feels some kind of love for and connection to them. He doesn’t want to disappoint them. He doesn’t want to be humiliated and look stupid himself by failing. But he is all twisted up inside, he is in pain. But the parents are not understanding, they are insensitive to all that, to all that is happening inside him. Because after all, they pretty much had the same done to them. But somehow they lived through it. They lived through their humiliation, they bit their lip and suppressed what they really thought and felt, to win their pips and stripes, they lived through their pain, and think that he should and can do the same. But it’s not enough for him any more. He looks at their lives without envy. He is caught in dilemmas about the meaninglessness of the books he is forced to study, the exams he is forced to take. His mind is not mature. He is not ready to consider his role in the world, to know if he wishes to be a lawyer or a doctor, he has not been educated to understand life in general that he can answer questions like that. He is just forced to jump hurdles, to be a success, and nobody cares what he is feeling inside. So then into the lives of some youths like him comes a supporter, comes a wife or girl, to hold the cracking-up youth together. But in our modern society, especially for the more sensitive boys who are naturally more wary of the motives of the other gender in any case, that may not happen. And then he has a friend. And that friend who is in pain too says – ‘hey, do you want to feel better? Try some of this.’ So it could be drink, it could be cannabis, it could be pornography, it could be actual sex, but in every case, what leads to the saying yes is the pain.

On Drugs and Alcohol

20

Of course part of this also is the rebellion, against the parents who do not understand. He or she is going to punish them for that lack of understanding, and maybe the only way he or she can do that is by deliberately screwing up. For after all, just what will they tell their friends and colleagues then, about this son or daughter who is not ‘god’s gift’ anymore, who is not being ‘a chip off the old block’, and making swollen with pride his parents and glorifying their family name? And indeed, the doctor father of this boy, who was at one stage forced to have him committed to a psychiatric hospital ward, did in fact admit to this feeling of shame (but then discovered that so many other ‘well-todo’ parents like himself had children in psychiatric care or therapy also). Such stories have led some of our modern psychologists and therapists to start tossing around ideas like unconditional love. That is, the idea is that a parent would say to a child – “we don’t care if you screw up. We don’t care if you aren’t a ‘success.’ We don’t care if you turn out to be a drug addict or ‘gay.’ We will love you unconditionally, we will love you anyway.” Which is just wonderful in theory, but the trouble is, doesn’t happen much in reality, and in any case, the unconditional love should have been what was there at the start of the child’s upbringing, not to try to remedy the mess that has occurred when the pattern has set in, and it’s far too late. As we know numerous people who may one day or another read these words will identify to at least some degree with what we have said, we should point out, that we are not offering information or explanation here in order to justify any rebellion against parents, or ‘throwing of one’s life away.’ However much one is in pain, and however much one’s parents are to blame, we have to accept that now we see the causes of our current situation our life is our own.

On Drugs and Alcohol

21

If we remain locked in a rebellion against their authority, which we can in fact still do in our minds, even though they may be long gone or dead, we are not our own person, acting independently, but only trying to cross over a line rebelliously which they once said ‘do not step over’, even though both they and their line are long disappeared into the dust. But the problem we have got is why should we behave? Why should we give up the drugs, the porn abuse or whatever, what’s the point of it all anyway? And for the individual we cannot necessarily answer that. Everybody has to go through their own pain and see if they think there is anything worthwhile coming out of it for on the other side. Some people find religion, or as is more acceptable to the scientifically educated intelligentsia nowadays, so called spirituality. But we can tell people there is a god, or there is a ‘spiritual path’, maybe a reincarnation through a series of lives, maybe a ‘heaven’ to attain, but if they don’t want to believe it, they won’t. We can even tell them – as we have done in some of our works, as has Gopi Krishna – that there are higher states of consciousness, that we are evolving that we are gradually transforming as individuals and as a society to a race of blissful and enlightened virtual ‘superwomen’ and ‘supermen’ who will live long, happy lives and possess a level of consciousness, intelligence and perhaps even psychic powers which will leave our own current lives looking like those of worms by comparison. But none of these ideas will necessarily work for those who are in deep emotional pain. As John Lennon put it in Yer Blues: Feelin’ lonely Wanna die

But we can tell people in a lot of pain and depression something. As drugs of all kinds have made people aware, our happiness or lack of it depends upon the condition of our nerves and brain.

On Drugs and Alcohol

22

Our brains are both electrical and chemical, and thus like a computer or other piece of electronic apparatus, they can malfunction in either a chemical or electrical way. Experiences can wound us and leave scars on our insides, and it is important to realise that these are not so unlike the wounds and scars on our outsides, which can take sometimes a long time to heal. So that is to say, that because of the conditions of our nerves and brains, the depressions or other bad states of our minds cannot necessarily be shrugged off via ‘positive thinking’ or whatever. We often have to accept that we must at times go through pain because the brain and nerves take time to heal, and many times we suffer – if only with tiredness or drowsiness – until that restorative and reparative healing has taken place. But we have to appreciate also, that the human brain is the most fabulously subtle and complex organ known to man in the entire universe, and we cannot expect to merely give it a few jolts to restore order to it like a misbehaving television set. Likewise, we cannot generally expect the sometimes ‘sledgehammer-like’ application of prescription drugs to the brain to effect repairs, any more than one could from the barbaric use of lobotomy and ECT (though we are not saying that in certain desperate circumstances the hopefully temporary use of drugs may help some people through phases they might not otherwise be able to cope with). Like most healing processes, the ‘repairs’ are carried out not by humans, but by Nature. That is, there is the most complex and perpetual activity going on inside the human body – only a small fraction of which we currently understand, though theories are numerous – to continually repair all the damage that living causes it. So we have to give the body a chance to heal, and as far as our brains and nerves are concerned, preferably we do not screw them up in the first place. And how are we screwing the brain and therefore psyche up? By applying too much stress and pressure to it.

On Drugs and Alcohol

23

By living too competitively, by not handling youth gently and sensitively, so that the young saplings grow into strong and well-shaped trees, rather than some kind of gnarled and twisted distortions that look like they were the products of thunderstorms, or in human terms, genetic experiments gone wrong. The bullying, competitive, overworking society has got to go, because we have found out that our brains are too sensitive. They cannot take the pressure of it any more – that is, amongst our educated, more cerebral members of the population, which is at least around 25-50%. We create psychologically messed up youths and adults, and then we get an army of other unscrupulous people – the drug dealers, porn merchants, gambling bosses and so on – who are shamelessly feeding upon their weaknesses and insecurities. We have a society that shoves sex in our faces at every turn, makes youth feel humiliated and inadequate for lacking sex experience, and then we can easily addict them to pornography and lure them into visiting lap dance clubs and consorting with prostitutes. But we don’t – as is the real truth – consider that this addiction is the consequence of neglected, troubled youth. We just argue over whether porn or drugs are good or bad. But whether porn or drugs are good or bad, the fact is that addiction is bad for everybody, as the use has then turned from pleasure to pain. And that is the situation that most users of drugs and porn and gambling sooner or later find themselves in – just indulging ever more, not for pleasure, but to relieve the pain experienced in the absence of their habit. So is there any safe ‘recreational drug use?’ Well, let us first note one fact about all drug use. In fact, even beyond drug use, let us discuss the nature of pleasure itself. That is, there is generally some kind of a downside to most of the pleasures we have, especially when we pursue them beyond a certain point.

On Drugs and Alcohol

24

For example, if we have sex now and then, it may be a pleasure, but if we have it addictively, compulsively, again, it tends to be more to relieve pain, of fostering a state of relief, than experiencing a positive state of pleasure or joy. That is, even with drugs, we find that the more often we have the drug, the less pleasurable it becomes, or the higher the dose we need to get the same ‘satisfaction’ out of it. Or again, differently, every drug user knows that after the up stage, there is a down stage, a ‘hangover’, or ‘withdrawal period’ or whatever. Let’s put it differently again. Let us take the average person who lives an exciting big city life, working, partying, shopping and having sex and drugs and alcohol nonstop, with their only break from activity as the few hours of unconscious sleep. If we were to take such a person and throw them temporarily upon a desert island (but with enough food, water, etc. to survive) as in the Tom Hanks movie Castaway, they would likely go crazy, go through all kinds of withdrawal behaviours for some considerable time. But what would the eventual result be? We put it to you, that they would like Tom Hanks in the admittedly fictional story, re-establish their connection to Nature. They would learn to watch the sun rise and set once again, and listen to the sound of the wind and the breeze, to once again look at the trees, the flowers and the birds, things that they have hardly ever known in a busy city life. This is certainly the kind of experience that most people find when they go on a camping expedition, and very quickly the modern conveniences of life, and the obsessive demands for hygiene and so on tend to diminish, and the frantic experience-hungry city dweller’s brain tends to slow down and become more peaceful. Life can become a joy once again, and simple pleasures like eating a bowl of soup with some plain bread can taste like a feast greater than anything the gourmets and their fabulously expensive restaurant meals can provide.

On Drugs and Alcohol

25

But the sunset is free, soup and bread is cheap, so again, we see that life has become so complicated and expensive because we have lost out natural instincts and tastes, we have become like sophisticated Romans who need all the extravagant delicacies and luxuries of life, and who eventually, lacking satisfaction in even that, must graduate to pornography and orgies of sex and wine and drugs. Nature has given us some desires which we can satisfy in a way that is satisfying and doesn’t pass over the border into the territories of addiction and pain. Mild use of alcohol for example does not cause much of a hangover, great memory loss, or incoherence of thought, but heavy use of it certainly does. As to drugs of the hallucinogenic kind however, we see that their effects are far more bizarre than anything moderate use of alcohol has to offer. So some of our experience-and-excitement-hungry citizens in pain have decided to interpret these bizarre events as a delectable set of thrills to be hungered after. And yes, these drugs can lead us into places that seem at least temporarily wondrous, because they can amplify our responses, they can allow us to drift into what are more or less waking dream states. Unfortunately, for some, depending on their response to the chemical reactions, and once again, the current state of their brain and nerves this same process of amplification of feeling (as if it were under a microscope) and involuntary drifting into delusional ‘waking dream’ states can make these experiences nightmarish and terrifying. The problem we have in assessing the effects of these kinds of drugs is that as we have mentioned elsewhere, we are not all the same as human beings. That is, those who have less sensitive emotional natures – no doubt reflecting a less volatile and delicate physiology – can likely take large quantities of these drugs without much problem, which would cause somebody with a very sensitive physiology and interior to go into awful states.

On Drugs and Alcohol

26

So we are warning the more sensitive and intelligent members of society, that likely they cannot take the same risks with these drugs that the less mentally evolved and complex can. As usual, we are not telling people what to do here, we are supplying them with the best information we have got with which to make their own decisions. For even those who claim to be unaffected by long term use of drugs such as cannabis, whatever they say, they cannot know if damage has been done. Some even claim cannabis is not addictive, but if they think that, let us see them do without it for say 12 months (and not substitute something else like heavy alcohol or other drug use) and then we will believe it. The fact is that any drug which is used habitually and affects an undue proportion of one’s waking hours is going to create a state of ‘false satisfaction.’ That is, because one will not generally adjust the rest of one’s life, because one gets oblivion and relief from the feelings of insecurity, inadequacy and so on which would prompt one to change things, this is obviously of an addictive nature, and to say it is only ‘psychologically addictive’ makes it no less addictive. But we are not condemning such people or telling them to stop it, as usual we are just discussing cause and effect. Because the entity which we really want to attack with our words, is the insensitive society, that is putting people into such states of feeling inadequate and insecure – when that is all entirely avoidable – such that they feel pain and thus easily succumb to the need to escape, and therefore to the various drugs, gambling, sex activity etc. which helps them do so. But what the drug then does to them, neither they nor your author has any way of knowing. Has thorough testing been done on drug users, to see how various parameters of their lives and mental functioning has changed? – e.g. their memory, their physical coordination skills, their intelligence and intellectual capacity as measured by a wide range of tests and so on.

On Drugs and Alcohol

27

It is likely it has, but again, such studies can always be contested. The problem is that when an individual becomes less aware, because they are less aware, they are unaware that they are less aware. Or that is to say, they are unaware that they are unaware. As in the famous Darwinism teaching trial depicted in the classic Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, the bible-thumping traditionalist preacher Matthew Brady when asked a certain awkward question about his beliefs, anxiously and defensively replied: I don’t think about things I don’t think about. It may sound rather George Bush, but sadly that is true of all of us. Our mental frontiers are limited, and we are all unaware of what is outside our own individual abilities of perception and understanding and experience. So naturally, a lot of unaware people, who think they have enough facts and information but are unaware of a lot of facts and information to the contrary are stating some not very educated opinions on these critical-tothe-future-of-our-society issues of drug use. So though from our point of view, this can only be partly an opinion, let us see what those like Buddha – as far as the author can see – said about these drugs such as cannabis and mushrooms and so on. According to kundalini ‘prophet’ Gopi Krishna alcohol in moderation is the only safe drug. He said that by evidence of hundreds or thousands of years in India, the users of ‘hashish’ were never trusted, were seen as irresponsible people. According to 20th century “king of gurus” J Krishnamurti, these hallucinogenic drugs can actually destroy the brain and when we look at people like Syd Barrett who seemed to become totally transformed in a negative way by long term use of these powerful drugs, it suggests he might be right. Again, Krishnamurti suggested that these drugs could cause genetic damage that might only show up in one’s grandchildren.

On Drugs and Alcohol

28

So this experiment that we have been conducting – for as we have said only about 40 years or so in the West – has got a long time to run yet surely, before we can look at the statistics on the deformities in child birth and so on, and correlate this to the drugs use of the parents. So though we cannot say this is all incontestable fact, we are just offering that information so the reader can make their own decision. For as we have said, we don’t expect to win an argument with everybody on these issues, because we cannot give any scientific ‘nuts and bolts’ explanation, and we very much doubt any scientists can either. But we suspect that partly the reason why not more is made of the drugs problem, is because a) the feminist society likes keeping men cabbaged and addicted while women take ever more control of the world and ‘get equal rights’ (your know, to big job titles, more shoes and breast implants, while their children are neglected or abused by childminders or traumatised in ‘nurseries’) b) the focus has moved to the other pole of the drugs issue, which is alcohol abuse This also has its feministic overtones, because typically many men are reaching for the bottle due to their unresolved problems and conflicts with women, and a seriously drunken man is absolutely the most ludicrous and contemptible creature for women to wreak their judgement and hate upon and feel superior by comparison too (except for the fact, that millions of women also – usually the ‘liberated ones’ – are now regularly getting drunk to the point of incapacitation and oblivion, and wake up sometimes not remembering where they’ve been or what they’ve done). Once again, what must be understood here, is that by careless childcare – e.g. mothers not loving and caring for children properly, and instead running off to jobs and leaving them to a childminder who doesn’t much care about them, and thereby they feel unloved, neglected and insecure – we create near permanently damaged and insecure human beings, who because they then become youths and adults in pain are easy prey to those who wish to sell them a drug or a drink.

On Drugs and Alcohol

29

In fact, such drinking to relieve the pain of unresolved conflict can set in amongst whole nations and races, for example as is widely experienced amongst the Irish and the Russian cultures to name but two. HOW CAN WE STOP THIS MALE ALCOHOLISM? millions of women, wives and mothers and girlfriends cry out in horror. But they are fooling themselves. It’s EASY to stop it! We simply STOP MAKING CHILDREN FEEL INSECURE. That is we don’t bully them, we don’t tease them, we don’t neglect them, we don’t torment them by comparing them to others who are quicker, prettier or smarter in one way or another. We don’t demand they become something that they may not be capable of being, but rather permit and assist them to become what they are capable of becoming and being. We also do not traumatise them by warring in front of them as man and woman, as even the slightest conflict between its parents – both of whom the child loves – is a worrying disharmony which alone can lead to insecurity; rather, we show them only the deep blissful and respectful love between us, which makes it feel to them as if they are living in a heavenly paradise. But to enact this simple solution we have to take a very hard look at ourselves as a society and that is the hard part. For example, our doctor, with his schizophrenic son, needs to understand that sending boys off to public school and proudly celebrating and boasting about their every exam success is not the way to raise a happy and secure child. Pressure creates inner torment. Inner torment creates the desire to escape. The desire to escape creates addiction. It is that simple! But because we have become insensitive we do not notice it.

On Drugs and Alcohol

30

These parents cannot feel their child’s pain. If they do see it momentarily they shout out – “don’t be weak. It’s tough to be a man. You’ve got to be tough.” But they are wrong. You don’t have to be tough to be a man. You have to be strong – i.e. selfsufficient. And you get strong (mentally, psychologically) by being unconflicted. By feeling secure from an early age, and this security comes about from careful parental care, that when you are suffering, in pain, hungry and so on at an early age, there is always a loving hand or breast there. So then by the time you get to two or three or four, you rarely need the loving hand any more, and certainly don’t need the breast. If offered it you would sooner or later push it away, and say – ‘hey, I’m a big boy now, I don’t need my mamma to hug me or console me any more.’ We find we can take pain, we don’t need a shoulder to cry on, and we don’t need a drug to escape like Houdini from our own minds via. But even relatively secure people can have crises of one kind or another along the way, later in life, especially in their close relationships. And then it requires the adult power of understanding to figure out what is going on, and why, and that is why your author has written all his books, to pass on to all who would listen what needs to be understood in that regard. And mainly, the message he is passing on, is that the world is not right now a very nice place to be living in. We have to start accepting that as fact. Men and women have been made enemies, hate has been stirred up between them by the wicked witch of feminism, so it’s very hard for them to be friends right now.

On Drugs and Alcohol

31

Fifty years ago men and women were not much competing for jobs. But now they are, it is vicious and cowardly, the bullying and the lying to get one up on one another, to get the promotion that the next person cannot, the job that makes one person feel proud and the other feel ashamed for not possessing. But all the leaders can say – is that person (usually boy or man) is no good, that person has committed a crime. They have taken a drug or like our old friend Mel Gibson has recently done, had too much alcohol and then gone crazy shooting off their mouth and dangerously driving a car. So it looks like even Mel, surely one of the richest and (so society tells us) most successful men in the world, happily married even so they say, is a man in pain, a compulsive drinker, an alcoholic. So let us have a guess in very general terms at what is wrong with Mel. Despite all he has done, despite all the women, the glamour, the money, the fame and the awards, he still doesn’t feel right about himself as a human being, he doesn’t feel right about himself as a man. And as we have said, women don’t necessarily want this situation to change, because the more badly men behave, the more weak and powerless they become, the more women become the boss, able to look down upon and judge men, say that men are wrong, men are no good, and that women are the superior sex. They don’t necessarily want boys to ever be independent, secure, because if boys really grew into men, they wouldn’t need them (in the same childlike, emotionally hungry and desperate way) any more. Of course, if men were grown up too – not only women – then that of course would enable men and women to be ‘equals’, true friends, but it appears that most women find the idea of a man being her equal or even superior too scary, and they like it the way it is with men being mentally and emotionally subservient, manipulable and weak. So women who let men by neglect or torment of them as children become alcoholics – which is what they have done, whether they know it or accept it or not – are the ‘superior sex’ are they?

On Drugs and Alcohol

32

The hundreds of millions of Western women who watch Sex and the City and buy hundreds of pairs of shoes while the world plunges into starvation, crime, drug addiction, terrorism and war are the superior sex are they? But then they turn it around and blame all those problems on men. They are obsessed with men’s errors in all respects, such as for example those small few who drink drive and knock a child over (your author incidentally was once knocked over by a woman driver, but fortunately only did a cartwheel or two and got concussion, and forgave her instantly as she ran towards him in hysterics, fearing the worst). In England only this week, such a case happened, of a hit-and-run-driver knocking a little girl over, and such is the paranoia, they arrested four different men – who each owned a similar car to the one reported – who it turned out shortly later none of whom had committed the crime. (the point being, they were certainly entitled to question these men, but why the totally over the top heavy-handed need to arrest?) But what they don’t do is ask where was that child’ mother, why was that child’s mother not protecting that child, supervising her, and keeping her off the road? We have a society that punishes men constantly for all that they do, and many times even for things they never did. For example, last week in England, a man who was a bookkeeper and defrauded around £1m from his employers to support his Internet gambling addiction was sentenced to five years in prison. (whereas perhaps we should be putting our negligent governments in the dock and jail, for aiding and abetting these awful addict-making industries to prosper and thrive) A woman bank employee however who defrauded her bank out of £ ½ m earlier this year, got a suspended sentence, and was excused from almost exactly the same crime on grounds that she had ‘a gambling disease.’

On Drugs and Alcohol

33

The same disparity is true of all sorts of other crimes, including murder, with in the case of even innocent men the sentence being lock the monster up and throw away the key, whilst women murder men left right and centre and get excused and set free on grounds of ‘abuse’ or ‘women’s problems’ or whatever. [they are now reviewing the Jill Dando murder case on the grounds of an unsafe conviction, which your author has long suspected – see The Innocent Persons Guide to Law – was a frame-up of a not very bright man ‘with the right psychological profile’ under pressure to convict] Then we add to it the fact that due to women’s blind acceptance of the capitalist society, they are so busy spending the money they are earning on shoes, holidays abroad and breast implants, they haven’t noticed that all men’s traditional jobs have been taken away and moved to the Third World. And then they turn round and wonder why men are alcoholic, why they are drug addicts and dealing drugs and stealing cars? They must be crazy, and indeed they are. We don’t mean they are mentally ill as such, as we have said, we mean they are insensitive. They are hypersensitive to their own needs, their own pain, but they are all but totally insensitive to that of their men folk, their own children even, whose hearts bleed as they watch them depart to work and leave them to the tender mercies of the nursery or the ‘creche’ or the babysitter. Your author is very angry – not in himself, in himself he is happy and has a barrel of laughs, for if he allowed himself to indulge in anger, he would get as insensitive as those he accuses – but he feels the need to speak for men and for little children, to speak for those without a voice. We know that not all women are out of their minds, that there are a few sensible ones left.

On Drugs and Alcohol

34

There is even one on the Internet called Dr Helen, who wrote a piece called Who Stole Psychology? somewhat confirming and paralleling the author’s own work How the Feminists Stole Psychology, of which your author was entirely unaware at the time of writing, and can be found at the following web address http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2005/11/who-stole-psychology.html Your author took the rare step of congratulating her on some of her work, which seems to regard men as human beings as well as women, and promised to mention her if he could, which he now has. But to those men and women who can understand, we are saying only this: Let us stop blaming individuals around us and men (or even women) as a gender for all that is going wrong. The problem is in the structure and (false) goals of our society. The problem is the competitive society that rewards status and not goodness as citizens and that feeds compulsively on greed and not need. The problem of drugs and alcohol is that men are not given proper roles in society – i.e. dignified jobs appropriate to their natures – and allowed to care for their wives and families as they desire (and are not therefore irresponsible as so many insensitive women wish to claim). A man who isn’t allowed to be a man starts doing destructive things, both to himself and to others, and women have to stop being insensitive to this fact in their envy and hate of men, and thus stop blaming the problem – i.e. troubled and insecure youths and men – of which they themselves, whether knowingly or not, have in most cases been the cause. The problem is that women marry or have children by men who don’t really know and love them for who they are – because women fall for flattery and status, instead of seeking a truly compatible mate – and then these same women feel it is ok – as feminist controlled society has told them – to go out to work and not be 100% devoted to their child, which they must be. This critical early development of the first 0-7 years of life is what makes us all what we are as human begins, and therefore makes the world.

On Drugs and Alcohol

35

And that is the part when we all need to be cared for by devoted parents – mostly mothers – who handle us with great patience and skill, and create out of us secure personalities who do not then therefore progress to being child molesters, rapists, criminals and addicted to excess sex, alcohol and drugs (as we have said, the sort of expression of desire that is not truly pleasurable but seeks only to escape the pain). And once again, it’s in the society that tells us that we are great or no good depending on how ambitious we are, and our jobs, instead of saying – hey, whoever you are, and whatever you do, you count just as much, we need your just as much, as long as you are a good citizen, as long as you are good. Alcohol in itself is not bad, just as knives are not bad, but if we abuse either, we can kill ourselves or others, so it is our insecurities, and consequent out of control minds and desires that is the problem – which as we have seen have been produced by childhood neglect and the denial of the natural roles of women and men, leading to misery and guilt in both cases – not the alcohol or the knife. A happy man or woman can drink alcohol in moderation and no inner demons of insecurity will start marching out – an unhappy and conflicted person can’t – the hell inside them starts to come out. So the problem is not alcohol, but that we have a population in pain. Though we are far from convinced that hallucinogenic drugs are equally harmless – biologically speaking – we can argue about the biology and physiology and social effects of drugs and alcohol till the cows come home, but not one thing is going to change, until we stop fighting one another in this needlessly competitive society, until men and women stop viewing one another as natural combatants and enemies, and learn to be friends, and until both parents and society as a whole sees how delicate and critical is the care and education of our children, and address that need of the child and of the true needs of the adult male and female individual as our number one concern.